Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 89183 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89183 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
“Apparently not,” she replied in crisp tones that barely covered her own annoyance.
His workday had started badly and quickly become worse. The CEO and owner of House in a Box (and the man who held far too many roles there) was feeling under pressure. “I’m sorry, mate,” he said in his thick Kiwi accent, “but I don’t want to grow too fast so we crash and burn.” Then he’d abruptly ended the call, as there was some emergency he had to deal with.
Kieran Taylor had too few staff. It was one of the things Malcolm, Genevieve, and their team would fix. What Kieran also had was a brilliant concept—small-footprint, eco-friendly homes that could be shipped in a box and put together for a price that was lower than most garages cost to build. He was a visionary who wanted to help overpopulated cities, poor people who hadn’t previously been able to dream of owning their own home, and even people who wanted to put a home in their backyard for their aging parents or grown-up kids.
Malcolm had every intention of making House in a Box a global brand, and he shared Kieran’s vision of genuinely helping people and the planet into the bargain. He had a feeling he’d be jumping on a plane to Christchurch before he was much older. Both he and Genevieve, who’d busted her butt pulling in investors to help Kieran take his vision global.
For pride’s sake, and for Genevieve, he didn’t want to see this deal fail at the last second.
And then Mari had called from the bookstore, pleading with him to pick up a woman named Josie at the airport and take her to his houseboat. He’d been happy to lend the houseboat—he rarely had time to go there these days—but did he have to play chauffeur too? Didn’t she know that his days at the office started at six in the morning and usually ended more than fourteen hours later? But when she’d explained that she’d already tried every other person in his family and that he was her very last resort before calling an impersonal car service to do the pickup, that had grated too. Why was he the last on her call list?
Of course, he knew precisely why. Mari not only knew how busy he was, she also knew that he could be a grumpy git at the best of times.
He ran a hand over his face, the ridiculously low number of hours he had been sleeping lately finally catching up with him. He was lucky that he never needed much sleep. Even for him, however, the four hours he’d been getting each night during the past week weren’t cutting it.
It should have been a good thing that he had a vacation to Thailand to look forward to, but even that was a mess. All because the woman he was supposed to go to Thailand with… Well, to put it bluntly, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to have dinner with her anymore, let alone spend a week in a foreign country with her.
It wasn’t that Katrina wasn’t beautiful, because she was quite possibly one of the most stunning women he’d ever dated. Unfortunately, it turned out that he needed more than looks to keep from being bored, a lesson he had learned—or rather had failed to learn—from one relationship to the next.
A part of him wondered if he should just suck it up and make it through the week in Thailand before telling Katrina that he thought there was someone better out there for her. You know, the whole “it’s not you, it’s me” speech.
But frankly, he wasn’t sure he’d make it through the flight to Thailand with her vacuous conversation, let alone a week on a beach. Inevitably, he’d want to parasail or trek through the jungle, and she’d complain that he wasn’t spending enough time with her, even though she’d be spending all of her time in a bikini on a chaise longue, scrolling through her social media feeds and posting pictures intended to make everyone who followed her jealous.
If she would read a book on the beachfront lounger, that wouldn’t seem nearly as bad. But no one he dated ever seemed to read. It was a pity, because when Malcolm wasn’t at the office, or hanging out with his family, the one thing he liked to do was read. Books about military history and business, mostly, along with a few novels.
In deep contrast to all of the women he had dated over the years, Josie had packed an entire suitcase with books. And the truth was that he didn’t remember much about her from high school beyond two things.
She’d always been reading.
And he had kissed her.
A kiss he had wanted to apologize for ever since.
Not actually the kiss, which had been surprisingly good as far as he could remember through his beer goggles. It was what had come after.